Glob-a-log

(Nothing to do with anything really but that suits the Silly Sunday Leitmotiv…)

Okay, it’s Sunday. The sun is shining (somewhere behind these bloody clouds anyway) and I’m so not in the mood to read any newspapers today.

So, let’s have some fun instead…

… and let’s start with some very weird video clip indeed:

Trololololololo (Russian torch & torture song…)

I’ve got more where that one came from – and you’d never guess where it did come from, so I’ll tell you.

Chances are none of you here have ever heard of the so-called MBM reports in the Guardian. MBM stands for Minute By Minute (report) and that’s what it is: One reporter with a TV who gives live bloggy comments on football matches (and sometimes cricket or even tennis matches.)

It’s mostly tongue in cheek (if it’s not all out sarcastic) and readers are always cordially invited to send their e-mails (and routinely insulted when they do.)

Sometimes, the reporter (or one of the readers) starts a riff about something or the other – preferably about something that has nothing at all to do with the match being played.

So, a few days ago, readers sent in links of weird & disturbing video clips – and they really came up with some beauties, like this one:

Salad fingers

Scary shit.

Less spooky but no less weird was this one. Not exactly a Teddy bears’ picnic but then again, if you cut down all their woods, those bears don’t have any place left to have picnics – or to shit…

… and then whose fault is it when they come to our cities and misbehave?

Here’s that clip:

Bears & Cars & Stuff

Okay, enough with the clips already, for now – though I will stick with the weird, if you don’t mind…

… so we will leave the bears to do whatever else they want to do…

… and move on to toads.

Yes, toads – and dead poets, and spendthrift Hull City Councillors:

”In a novel way to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the death of the poet Philip Larkin, a council is to spend £200,000 on 65 giant fibreglass toads. The oversized amphibians will be displayed at locations around Hull for 10 weeks later this year. According to Hull City Council documents, “This project is designed to spark interest in Larkin’s poetry among people who are made curious by the unexpected presence of their local ‘toad’.” The move is intended to honour Larkin’s two poems, Toads and Toads Revisited.”

(Here are those poems, by the way, if you care about that kind of stuff: Toads & Toads Revisited)

Okay, one last clip, before I go – another Salad Fingers episode. Enjoy:

Shore Leave

Again, I’m not in the mood to read any newspapers. It’s almost 17.30 when I write this. I spent the last three-and-a-half hours shopping for food, cutting up innocent vegetables and doing quite cruel things to a bit of lamb. In about an hour it will be time to heat up the oven, so that yet another dinner for six can be served around 19.30.

Which leaves me an hour to shower, dress up and write my daily column.Which is doable - just about.

Anyway, yesterday I went to the pub, to watch the speed skating in Vancouver. ‘Rychlobrusleni’, they call that here in the Czech republic. Not a word you will use a lot here but still a rather nice & strange mouthful of a word.

During the breaks I read a little book, called Fup, by Jim Dodge, which was weird and wonderful – and it also gave me something I can use as a Quote Of The Day:

“I ain’t got an ounce of pimp in me.”

I wonder how many people can truly claim that.

Ah yes, before I go to take that shower, there’s this. There are many disturbing and also disgusting things in the world.

Like egg cream, for instance…

… but there are even worse things than that, out there.

Like the Hug E Gram.

DON’T LINK TO THIS, if you have a weak stomach.

Okay, that was all for today, folks. See you tomorrow.

Have you seen the SuperBowl, last weekend?

No?

Well, neither did I. Life’s too short to waste half a day watching commercials, interspersed with the antics of weirdly dressed men, doing incomprehensible things with something not even shaped like a proper football.

Still, even those of us who did not watch cannot have failed to hear and/or read about the controversial choice of geriatric pop band The Who as the Half-Time musical act.

In 2003 the band’s guitarist Pete Townshend had been arrested for ‘accessing child pornography online’, so the Child Abuse Watch Group tried (and failed) to stop The Who from performing at the SuperBowl.

Why am I rehashing this tired old stuff?

Well, because I’m afraid that we may expect far worse in the time leading up to (and no doubt during) the upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

I mean, if you can create a screaming row in most of the world’s newspapers when an aged guitarist who once watched child porn appears live on TV for a few minutes…

… then it’s not hard to imagine the media melt-down when the Net’s most infamous paedophile will have a starring role during the whole of those two-and-a-half snow-draped weeks in Vancouver.

As the following newspaper shows, this one is even bigger than the Michael Jackson trial:

“A Polish newspaper mistakenly identified “Pedobear”, a notorious internet meme, as one of the mascots of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. The Gazeta Olsztynska published an image showing the bear alongside genuine Olympic mascots Quatchi, Sumi, Miga and Mukmuk to illustrate a feature about the Games. It appears that the newspaper lifted the picture from Google Images, unaware that it had been created as a prank by Michael Barrick, a Canadian artist and graphic designer.”

Right, it’s the final day of 2009 – if not the actual final day of the decade – so, as promised, here’s my final installment of the calendars-we-really-need-to-have-in-2010 series.

I don’t have much blather time, today, because I have a largish meal to cook as well. So, let’s get this one over and done with quickly:

1) Sports are always a great cash vehicle, so what better way to make a few easy bucks than to present the gullible world with yet another ‘Golden Sports Moments’ calendar: Featuring Thierry Henry’s handball, the fake blood rugby scandal, Formula One’s deliberate car crash, followed by Tiger Wood’s less deliberate fire hydrant crash, the whole of the drug-addled Tour de France, etcetera, etcetera.

2) The whole Darwin versus Creation debate boils down to the question whether man is a rising ape or a fallen angel. Still, wherever one stands in that particular fight, most people would agree that mankind has come a long way since it climbed out of those trees – and what better way to celebrate this than by producing & selling the ‘Human Progress’ calendar: With photos of that recently stolen ‘Arbeit macht frei’ banner at the entrance of Auschwitz, pictures of Cambodia’s mountains of skulls, Quantanamo Bay (or Abu Ghraib) and Lubyanka prison, action pics of Japan’s rape of Nankin and the bombing of Hiroshima, a photo of Robert Mugabe, und so weiter, und so weiter.

3) Again, we can try to bring together two of the best things in the world, with a ‘Food is Better Than Sex’ calendar: Featuring photos of a naked Nigella Lawson swimming in a huge bowl of minestrone soup, Johnny Depp doing someting rude (in the raw) to a man-sized sprout, Carla Sarkozi’s naked struggles on an XXXL plate of spaghetti, Brad Pitt’s nude climbing over mountains of mashed potattoes and one of a naked Angelina Jolie not quite mounting a gigantic fish stick.

Right, I’m off to the kitchen, to do something really mean to an innocent chicken – fully clad, I might add.

You all have a very happy New Year.

(You can find the three earlier Calendar posts HERE & HERE & HERE.)

(Hey, if I had to do it with Monsieur Sarkozi I’d also say ‘Pas pour moi’…)

“Durex: Because I like birdies…!”

A bit of William Blake always comes in handy – as in:

“Tiger, Tiger running right/into hydrants in the night”

In all honesty though, I’m getting rather sick of this whole Tiger Woods story.

It doesn’t help that he plays golf – which is truly a very boring sport. On that one I’m firmly with Times columnist Rod Liddle, who wrote,

“I know nothing of the sport and wish to know even less; for me, the difference between a bogey and an eagle is that the latter hurts a hell of a lot more if it is lodged in your left nostril.”

What really doesn’t help is that Wood’s taste in women runs to Barbie look-alikes – but then, you know, he’s a golfer. Boring, and predictable, and stuff.

So, no more Tiger stories – though I do have a rather nice story about another animal and one that was much more engaging than Tiger ever will be, even if the latter humped a thousand more hydrants.

Talking of which, humping inanimate objects, that is, Kiki (the tortoise) did that much better than Woods (the Tiger) did as well. As the following, quite poignant story makes clear:

“France was in mourning today for one of its oldest and best-loved lotharios, a giant tortoise named Kiki, who died at the age of 146. According to Marie-Claude Bomsel, a vet at the zoo, he was so vigorous in his pursuit of female tortoises that his grunts could be heard from the other end of the zoo and the Jardin des Plantes.

“To be honest, from time to time I even saw him go after a wheelbarrow. You see what we were dealing with,” Bomsel told French radio. “That was one of his characteristics. We all loved him.”

Kiki weighed 250kg and had to be moved about using a forklift.”

(The luck of the Irish: Outflanked again…)

Those who don’t follow football – or soccer – can go away now, if the title alone didn’t keep them from arriving as far as this already. Those who do love the soi-disant ‘beautiful game’ will need no reminders of the Henry Handball Hoopla during the World Cup entry decider between France and Ireland.

Still, here’s the whole affair in one sentence: Henry cheated and France profited from this – and Ireland was able to put another grudge on their already full shelf of historic grudgewear.

What followed this affair was a renewed discussion about refereeing and the pros and cons of using video evidence during matches. In favour of such measures are those who say that football has become such big business and the players so good at all forms of cheating, that those who love and/or play the game deserve these extra measures (and that the game might even need them in order to survive.)

Those who don’t like the idea argue that looking at video evidence would take too much time, would not be conclusive at all times and would also do harm to the idea (or myth) of footbal being a noble and character building sport.

Today, I thought of something that might please both these groups to quite a large extent and that might actually be quite effective in punishing cheats and ending most cheating entirely. At this moment, football has only two real sanctions (the yellow and red cards) and only one way to divide the winning and losing sides: Goals scored & allowed.

We could add a third element to that: Video evidence.

Not in the way proponents of that measure want to use such evidence now, though – but as an added element that would not effect actual playing time. So, you would play the game in real time, the way it is played now but another set of umpires would watch the game like viewers at home do: On television. They would then be able to give penalty points to those players who cheated without the referee noticing this. These points would then be used (with the actual goals scored) to decide which team will be declared winners.

I will gladly leave it to others to flesh out this system but you could do it in any number of ways. You could, for instance, give one ‘cheat point’ for an offence that didn’t get the yellow card it would have deserved and two points for a red card offence. You could give ‘anti-goals’ for each goal that had been scored through an unobserved foul – and I’m sure you could do the same for other offences, like diving, bad tackling, handling the ball, et cetera, et cetera.

You could announce these decisions after the match, or you could do it in two parts: One set of results during the break and the latter directly after the match. You could even have an extra scoreboard, on which these decisions were announced the moment they were made, so that both the players and the public would know what was going on, almost in real time.

I dare say that the game would see a lot less cheating if players knew that getting caught by the camera would actually have real consequences – that is, would cost them games as surely as ‘goals against’ do now. It would also add something extra to the game: Something to talk about during and after the game, while it would not cause any interruption to the flow of play.

If the FIFA and/or UEFA would be interested to use this system I hereby dub ‘A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Football of Poor People in Ireland from Being Burdened by the Evil French’, they are welcome to do so – after they pay the inventor of this system (me, me, me!) a cool million Euros.

Which is, in itself, a quite modest amount.

(Subtle as always…)

(Singing, ‘Fuck you, I can do what I want to’ or something…)

In the aftermath of what should now, I suppose, be officially called Thierry Henrygate, we can only hope that the two countries involved can get over themselves.

Maybe some sort of Truth & Reconciliation Commission is in order – under the benevolent eye of Sepp Blatter and Nelson Mandela, perhaps. (Well, we know that at least the latter of those two actually cares about football…)

Not that everything is now a Disneyfied fairytale in South Africa.

This became most painfully clear, last Friday, at a rugby union international in Toulouse. Yes, France was again involved in an unholy sporting row, be it in a less hands-on capacity.

When the South African reggae singer Ras Dumisani stepped up to the microphone to sing his country’s national anthem, his performance showed that here was at least one black voice that was more than willing to tell the world that it was far from reconciled with any past injustices.

As the following clip proves beyond any doubt:

(All I’m saying, Don’t ask U2 to do the French anthem for the next fifty years or so…)

Right, permit me to gloat for a little bit: My team, Ajax Amsterdam, just beat their old rivals Feyenoord (Rotterdam) 5-1. Ah yes, Amsterdam versus Rotterdam: The only thing these places lack is some bard giving these rivals the old ‘Capulets & Montagues’ treatment.

Well, maybe not.

I’m a big fan of Shakespeare but Romeo and Juliet has never been a play I warmed to. I prefer my teenage suicide pact to take slightly less time than a full five acts.

“A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head:
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished:
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.”

Woeful, indeed.

Like Feyenoord today – though the club’s despondent fans can take some cold comfort from the fact that it would have taken longer to sit through that dreaded play.

Okay, it won’t bring them any comfort whatsoever, of course. Ah well – or, as an old Dutch sage once wrote, “Such is life and it gets sucher every day.”

5-1 though…

Brilliant!

Anyway, enough of the football. We’ll exeunt with a bit more Will. Do you know who once said the following about Hamlet?

“Well, yeah, well, we must think about bums on seats,
Bill.  Let’s face it: It’s the ghost that’s selling
this show at the moment.  Joe Public loves the ghost;
he loves the swordfights; he loves the crazy chick in
the see-through dress who does the flower gags and then
drowns herself.  But NO-ONE likes Hamlet — no-one.”

No? Then you better WATCH THIS OLD YouTube CLIP…

… and here’s another one, to round this silly column with a sleep(less night for all Feyenoord fans – okay, enough already…):

P.S.: To those complaining about the use of the word ’soccer’ in the title: Get a life…

(Well, that or an iceberg…)

The world economy might, as of yet, be rather sickly but the world’s doom sayers are still doing a brisk trade – even though some of it is the equivalent of flogging cheap souvenirs to the Lourdes couch crowd:

“Football players have been warned against spitting on the pitch, since it could increase the risk spreading swine flu - as two Premier League clubs have been hit by the virus. The Health Protection Agency (HPA) cautioned that spitting - which is commonplace in football games - could see infections being passed on from one player to another.”

As bleak warnings go, ‘Don’t spit on the grass’ is what the Titanic’s music programme would have been to that never-quite-raised warning, ‘I thought I thaw an itheberg.’

Just the tiniest bit irrelevant, I mean.

I’m sure this is just a tiny hiccup in the inner workings of the sturdy doom sayer’s machine but it would appear to be one of those days that nothing seems to go quite right for the end-is-nigh crowd. As the following story shows:

“News is spreading quickly here that scientists writing in a popular science periodical (Dutch) have debunked the 2012 date (google translation linked) featuring so prominently in doomsday predictions/speculation across the web.”

The reports of the planet’s death are greatly exaggerated, and all that.

Still, a mere delay ain’t that bad. At the very least it will give the doom trade eight more years to flog their ‘We’re so fucked!’ T-shirts.

Mind you, if the end of the world comes with the kind of portents Iceland’s most famous blogger Alda Sigmundsdóttir reports, I’m all for it:

“Like many other Icelanders, I did a sharp double-take at yesterday’s headlines: McDonald’s – that bastion of American fast food glory – had decided to pack up its golden arches and wave bye-bye. So long Iceland. Have a nice time piecing your country back together! According to Sky News, “The withdrawal of the golden arches symbolises a sharp fall from economic grace for a nation.” Meanwhile, the Consumerist proclaimed: “Iceland is so messed up McDonald’s is giving up and going home.””